21 Jump Street fuelled stellar Vancouver careers

The series that made Johnny Depp a star was important to writers and producers behind the scene

Vancouver producer N. John Smith (left) celebrates the 100th episode of 21 Jump Street in 1991 with some of the cast and crew. From left to right, Smith, head of production Steve Sassen, actor Michael Bendetti (John Depp’s replacement), actor Holly Robinson, actor Steve Williams, producer and Jonathon Glassner.

Photograph by: Lynn Smith
, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER — 21 Jump Street is known as the TV series that made Johnny Depp a star. But it was just as important to the people behind the scenes.

In tandem with shows like Wiseguy and MacGyver, Jump Street put Vancouver on the map as a film production centre in the late 1980s. All sorts of people got their start on the series, from actors to directors to various crew.

Producer John Smith joined the show in its fifth and final season, after Depp had already left. But the contacts he made on Jump Street played a key role in a long and successful career.

“I’m told I’ve produced more hours of television than anybody else in Canada,” says Smith, 65, who worked on TV shows such as Stargate, Poltergeist and Sanctuary.

“But I don’t know ... I never really worried about stuff like that. The projects were fun, I got a lot of laughs out of it.”

Smith recently retired, but with a 21 Jump Street movie about to be unleashed on the masses Friday, he spoke to The Sun about at his role in the Jump Street saga.

Smith got his start in the film business on The Beachcombers, way back in 1971.

“He said ‘If you want to look after it, go ahead.’ So I rented them the building [which was a café in the series]. Phil Keatley was the executive that put Beachcombers together, and liked the boats I had down at the dock there. So they said ‘Would you rent the boats and be our technical adviser?’

“It was only supposed to last for eight half-hour episodes, and it went on for 19 years.”

The film biz was very small in the 1970s (“there was probably one and a half crews in Vancouver”), and Smith wound up being the go-to guy for anything to do with boats and film.

Eventually this led MGM to offer him a job as a production manager on a remake of the ‘60s series Sea Hunt. This led to a job on Unsub, a series by the maverick American producer Stephen J. Cannell. Unsub sounds like another nautical deal, but it was about an FBI forensic team that dealt with grisly murders.

“Unsub was a very high-end, violent series, it was probably 10 years before its time,” says Smith, who is listed as N. John Smith (for Norman) on the imdb site, to avoid confusion with other John Smiths, including the Canadian director John N. Smith.

Unsub’s volence led its cancellation in 1989, even though it had excellent ratings. A year later, Smith was brought in for another Cannell production, 21 Jump Street.

“I got along real well with Steve Cannell, and Steve Sassen, who was running the Cannell outfit in Vancouver,” he says.

“Jump Street had been going on for four years.

“They wanted to syndicate the show, so I said I would take it to the fifth year.”

A lot of his job was figuring out how to cut costs.

“At one time [the show cost] $1.8 million an episode, and the last year, when they lost Depp, they wanted to take the show down, get it done more economically,” he relates.

“The budget for year four was $1.65 million [per episode] and we took it down to $1.1 million in the fifth year.”

The television and film business was a very different beast in 1990.

Much of 21 Jump Street was filmed at the old Wood Vallance Leggatt warehouse in the 500-block Carrall Street, just south of the Sam Kee building (popularly known as the thinnest building in the world).

“We had the 21 Jump Street Chapel right in that [Wood Vallance] building,” he says.

“There was [also] a jail set in there. The neat part about it was we could schedule half a day in the Jump Street Chapel, but then go out to all those gritty alleys that were right there in Gastown.

“In those days, Thursday/Friday night you worked to daylight the next morning. There were cop shows all night in gritty alleys and stuff. My crew had beer bottles thrown at them out of windows in alleys for years, doing all those cop shows downtown. We did Commish downtown, Street Justice, all these gritty cop shows right by the Carrall Street studio.”

The Carrall Street studio had a fire and was demolished, but 21 Jump Street had already moved out to a building that had been a large laundromat in Burnaby.

“We built a whole exterior alley in that building so we didn’t have to shoot outside at night in the alleys,” he notes. “Because we got really tired of the drunks down there, at two o’clock in the morning they’re throwing beer bottles at you out the window. So I thought what the hell, we’ll build a whole alley in the sound stage, and we did.

“And it was fabulous. You could take cars in there — you couldn’t do car chases, but you could do pullups and shootouts and stuff like that. We had it so we could spray water in there, because it always looked good to have it raining.”

Cannell had built North Shore Studios by then, which Smith used for 21 Jump Street’s school scenes.

“At one time, they used to go to schools and rent classrooms,” he says. “So we took a stage and built a couple of hallways on the stage and just kept changing the hallways to make them look different.

“Ian Thomas was the production designer. We called it 21 hallways, because we’d turn it around, paint it a different colour, put different steps in [and shoot it].”

He loved working for Cannell, a legendary Los Angeles producer who created TV shows like The Rockford Files, The A-Team and Baretta. Looking to save money, Cannell started filming in Vancouver, and the local film industry took off.

“Steve Cannell loved Vancouver,” says Smith.

“If he wanted to come up, he’d catch a plane out of L.A. at seven in the morning and be in Vancouver for a meeting at the studio at 10:30. Catch a five o’clock flight, and be home that night.

“Same time zone, and the dollar was good in those days. You were working basically at a 62 cents exchange, so they could bring a million eight [American] up to Canada and get three and a half-million dollars worth of production value out of it.”

The two main writers on the final season of 21 Jump Street were Ann Donahue and Jonathan Glassner, who both went on to become major players in Hollywood.

Donahue co-founded the CSI franchise, which Glassner has worked on as a director. Glassner was also one of the writers and producers of Stargate, and recruited Smith to come over to the series. Smith wound up working on the various incarnations of Stargate for 14 years.

“Well, Stargate was just a shoo-in [for success],” he says.

“It was an interesting show, and they put the money into it, we had a relatively good budget. And Richard Dean Anderson’s a good actor, he had a large following.

“It holds the record for the longest running sci-fi show. We beat X-Files I think by eight episodes, then we went on to the spinoff. [With] the original series and the spinoff, I was doing 42 hours [of TV] a year, which was a real challenge.”

How did they manage to shoot two TV series at the same time? By building a lot of infrastructure.

“When Stargate came they had a two-year order for it,” he says.

“Some series you only get a six-hour order. “So we built about a million dollars worth of sets, and we amortized those sets over [two years of shows].”

Stargate kept on adding infrastructure, to the point where it had an unheard-of nine sound stages.

“There is not another television series in North America that had nine sound stages,” he states. “One of those being the Effects stage, the biggest sound stage in North America.”

This is no idle boast: the Effects stage at Bridge Studios is 40,000 square feet, double the size of most film sound stages.

When Stargate finally wound down, Smith decided it was time to return to the Sunshine Coast, where he had built a waterfront house.

He isn’t completely retired, though: he’s pitched a couple of documentary ideas to the CBC. And in case you were wondering, he still owns Molly’s Reach, which is on property that his family has owned since 1925.

“My dad passed away a few years ago,” he says. “I told him I’d keep the property in the family for at least a hundred years, so I’ve got a few years to go yet.”

Vancouver producer N. John Smith (left) celebrates the 100th episode of 21 Jump Street in 1991 with some of the cast and crew. From left to right, Smith, head of production Steve Sassen, actor Michael Bendetti (John Depp’s replacement), actor Holly Robinson, actor Steve Williams, producer and Jonathon Glassner.

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